BLACK HOLING

As we celebrate the magnificence of space I recently had a conversation with a youngster about Black Holes.

It ranged from what might survive them to what could neutralise them.

Tardigrades, those small 'water-bears', are well-known for being able to exist in all extreme environments including the vacuum of space. Could a tardigrade cope with a Black Hole?

We enjoyed imagining the moss-piglet entering another dimension intact but after googling the question it would appear that as tardigrades are simply made of matter like you and me then they would be spaghettified like you and me on contact with the Event Horizon.

So to our next subject, the world's most dangerous living thing, the Bacteriophage, a cloning microbial viral horror stealing the information from bacteria and replacing it with its own. Yes, even this information thief could not survive the rigours of the Hole as they too are just plain matter. Even their ability to fake information would be useless as no information can escape from a Black Hole [except possibly Hawking Radiation I understand].

What do you think readers? What could survive?

As for neutralising a Black Hole, my young friend suggested anti-matter, the idea being that this would cancel out normal matter, assuming that a Black Hole is indeed normal and/or matter. Googling this once more brought us no joy and my fellow conversationalist had to accept that his theory did not hold enough water.

However we did come across other forms of phenomena such as Exotic Matter, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Strange Quarks and Quark Stars to name a few and these merit further googling as to whether any of these might plug a Black Hole.

Any thoughts readers?